David Gere is harnessing the
power of art as a potent weapon in the global war against a killer
epidemic

Sapphire
Dance Workshop created a powerful message about AIDS as part
of David Gere's Make Art/Stop AIDS conference in Kolkata.

by Roberta G. Wax
Photograph by Ranjit
Sinha

ART, WROTE THE AIDS ACTIVIST AND CRITIC
DOUGLAS CRIMP, HAS THE POWER TO SAVE LIVES. BUT TO RECOGNIZE,
FOSTER AND SUPPORT THIS POWER, “WE WILL HAVE TO ABANDON
THE IDEALISTIC CONCEPTION OF ART. WE DON’T NEED A CULTURAL
RENAISSANCE; WE NEED CULTURAL PRACTICES ACTIVELY PARTICIPATING
IN THE STRUGGLE AGAINST AIDS.”

Enter David Gere, an associate professor of dance
studies in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures
(WAC). For Gere, Crimp’s words, written in 1987, clearly
define the purpose of his own work. He is not interested in entertaining
art, in flowery art, in purely aesthetic art. His goal is art
with a powerful, fundamental purpose — to inform, to educate
and, most importantly in this time of AIDS, to prevent.

“What I am trying to do in my work is to cut
down to the bone,” he says. “In the beginning of the
AIDS epidemic, many artists felt that the best thing they could
do was to show a dance, sell some tickets, make some money and
give it to an AIDS organization. But that wasn’t enough,
not then and not now.”

It is Gere’s hope that artists, whether visual
or performance, will abandon the notion of themselves merely as
fund-raisers and instead come to see themselves as true activists
who focus their efforts not on trying to transcend AIDS, but on
bringing an end to the epidemic around the world.

Gere’s awareness of art as a powerful weapon
in the global war on AIDS began in the 1980s when he lived in
San Francisco and wrote as an arts critic for such papers as the
Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles
Times and The New York Times. “I saw what was happening
with dances that were being produced during that period that played
a role in slowing and controlling the epidemic in the U.S.,”
he says. “And I began to think that those same tactics that
were effective here in the United States could be used elsewhere,
in places like India, for example. Some things don’t translate
well across cultural boundaries, but some do, and from my viewpoint,
the scroll painter in Calcutta is a close cousin to Bill T. Jones
making dance in the United States.”